Follow the author of this article

Follow the topics within this article

Alastair Sooke wishes a set of interviews with the YBAs had been more gossipy

It is almost three decades since Damien Hirst persuaded his peers at Goldsmiths College to mount Freeze, the do-it-themselves exhibition in a Docklands warehouse. Today, the “Young British Artists” are all middle-aged; the group’s most infamous rabble-rousers now respectable members of the establishment. Tracey Emin is CBE and RA, as well as YBA; in 2013, she fronted an advertising campaign for Marks & Spencer.

BritArt, once urgent and white-hot, is now a spent force, but it still dominates the topography of British contemporary art, at least in the press. Hirst’s pickled shark and Emin’s unmade bed, now old enough to have accrued the stale smell of art history, are still cited as shorthand for the sensationalist art, preoccupied with sex and death, that all living British artists supposedly produce. Artrage! the Story of the BritArt Revolution, a brisk, serviceable account of the YBAs by the former foreign correspondent Elizabeth Fullerton, cannot help but fuel this obsession.

It begins, conventionally, with the Freeze show of 1988, and ends with the fire in 2004 in an east London warehouse that destroyed several well-known BritArt pieces, including Emin’s appliqued tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (1995). In between, Fullerton identifies the Sensation exhibition of Saatchi’s BritArt collection at the Royal Academy in 1997 as the movement’s “high-water mark”. There are thumbnail sketches of unsung YBAs such as Anya Gallaccio, who makes ephemeral installations out of flowers and ice, and Michael Landy, who emerges as one of the movement’s heroes, for his shows challenging the wastefulness of Western consumer culture.

The YBAs were hailed as a vigorous, democratising force, making contemporary art accessible for everyone. But this is not quite true. BritArt forced the cultural establishment to open up, but it did so, most advantageously, for the YBAs themselves. And what was their secret? Hype.

Any sensitive reader of Artrage! will conclude, even if its author does not, that the BritArt “revolution” was engineered, with chilling calculation, by its chief (and, at points, sole) patron, the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, who knew a thing or two about promotion. “Saatchi is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, reason for the YBAs,” Hirst tells Fullerton. Unfortunately, neither Saatchi nor Jay Jopling, the Old Etonian dealer who became BritArt’s pre-eminent salesman, agreed to be interviewed by Fullerton.

Anyone hoping for gossip will be disappointed by Artrage! The YBAs always provided “good copy” playing up to their reputations as boozers, brawlers, “four-nighter” carousers. But BritArt’s rock’n’roll bacchanalia does not find its echo in Fullerton’s strangely listless prose. Her blank tone blanches intrigue from the few salacious details that she does include. A paragraph detailing the YBAs’ labyrinthine love lives, for instance, is little more than a boring list of names. It’s a shame, because it makes a well-illustrated, studiously researched book less entertaining than it should be.

Bacchanalia: YBAs gather at the Turner Prize party, 1991

Moreover, the book contends that BritArt “would blow apart the elitist hierarchy of the fusty art world and rewrite the rule book”. But this received wisdom goes unchallenged. In fact, British Pop Art had already “rewritten the rule book”, in a remarkably similar fashion, in the early Sixties. It would be more original to consider the YBAs as lucky beneficiaries of the social change swirling around during the Nineties. “Up until [BritArt’s heyday],” says the photographer Johnnie Shand Kydd, who documented the group, “private views had been a polyester cup with some lukewarm cheap white wine, and suddenly it was champagne and supermodels.”

A more fundamental flaw is Fullerton’s reluctance to venture strong opinions of her own. She prefers instead to cite those of the 35 artists, as well as 14 art-world insiders, whom she has interviewed. As a strategy, this is fine: their eyewitness testimony is her book’s strong suit.

Marcus Harvey, for instance, tells Fullerton why he made his controversial portrait of the child killer Myra Hindley: “Because there was something deeply, animally sexual about her countenance, I found it compelling and troubling.”

Blowing hierachy apart: Mat Collishaw's Bullet Hole (1988)

The middle-class artist Marc Quinn, a Cambridge graduate who came to prominence with Self (1991), a frozen cast of his head made with his own blood, tells Fullerton that he found it “difficult” to be accepted because the movement had such a pronounced “working-class hero angle” to it. “It wasn’t a dry academic bunch of people,” confirms YBA Mat Collishaw. “[They] were more motivated by drinking and dancing and talking than by writing manifestos.”

The former YBA dealer Karsten Schubert laments the Tate’s lack of appreciation of BritArt at the time: “The Tate was completely not interested and disengaged, to the point of negligence.” Yet Tate’s director, Nicholas Serota, defends his record: “There was an understandable hesitation that we shouldn’t be taken in by the hype.”

Art critic Adrian Searle is memorably catty about the trajectory of Hirst’s career: “He’s one of those artists who’s lived life backwards really: you do your mature work first and your juvenilia later.”

A few more sharp remarks like this would have been welcome, to counter the general tone of self-congratulation. Overall, though, I found myself longing for a more impassioned authorial voice. I couldn’t tell whether Fullerton loved any of the art under discussion, or why she felt compelled to write Artrage!, and why now.

The problem with applying a reporter’s objectivity to BritArt is that this overexposed movement feels too much like old news.